Musings on eLearning and instructional design from Kineo's VP of Learning Design.

Friday, June 22, 2007

The Buzzing Blogging Hive

This morning I had the pleasure to chat live with Brent Schlenker and Allison Anderson in one of Brent's occasional "talk casts". It was very cool on many levels. If you're up to it, listen in....by the end of the hour or so (and bless you if you actually make it to the end) Brent and I just ramble on a whole variety of e-Learning topics.

Early in the conversation Brent asked us about our blogging experiences. I shared my beehive metaphor, which I now share with you in a more fully fleshed out form:

Way back when, when I first started blogging (gosh, it was the summer of 2006; can't believe how much time has gone by! Seems like just last year....) -- so way back then I experienced the web in as a one-dimensional form. A flat wall of websites and wikipedia and stuff.

When I first tried out blogging, I was in a vacuum. I hadn't read other people's blogs yet, so I didn't get it. It was a very flat world.

Somewhere along the line as my current job evolved, I started doing more "research". And I started reading more blogs. And it was like pulling a board away, starting to get a peek at what lay underneath the flat wall.

Somewhere along the line, I got up the guts to actually comment on someone's blog and then I realized I needed to just throw my voice into the mix. It turns out, I had something to say, and I wanted to be a part of whatever this thing was/is.

Eventually the board came off completely. There was some chipping of paint and a bloodied finger on a rusty nail. Underneath the flat wall, I discovered a teeming hive of hard-working honey bees. Buzzing loudly. A lot of cross-pollination. Dripping with the sweet nectar of knowledge, the honey of all of this collective work.

This flat web wall became a whole 'nother world.

Each of us is in our own little honeycomb cell, but we journey far throughout the day.

Hives overlap -- where are the boundaries between corporate e-Learning and educational technology and k-12 teachers and higher ed and non-profit management and enterprise 2.0?

The boundaries get blurrier the longer I buzz around.

The Queen Bee for whom we're all working -- is she the greater good of humankind? Is it all that noble? I hope so.

3 comments:

Listened to the interview and really enjoyed it. Good conversation, ideas and insights into blogging, conferences and e-learning. Good stuff and sounds like you guys had a good time during the discussion. Good luck with your future stalking....